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Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would your o
by dclowd9901 14y ago
Like the author, I too am concerned people aren't taking this seriously. Not to say that anything can be done about it, but just to face it (as you would your own mortality): If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too.
This is not fiction, this is truth and it's inevitable. I'm curious how society will adapt to the fact that the finite resources of the world will actually start to constrain them. Almost certainly birth rates will decline. Households will probably return to a single income earner (who is now making what both earners used to make combined).
The world will be different, but people keep trying to hold onto this notion of 6% unemployment like it's sacred. It's a relic of days where we needed the human brain and body because it worked faster than a computer and robot. Such is no longer the case. That is the paradigm shift, and that's why things will be different.
- gph 14y ago>If you aren't developing software, your job will likely become obsolete someday. And, indeed, if you are developing software, and not keeping up with advances, yours will too. Even if you do keep up with advances, I don't doubt at some point Programming compliers/interpreters will evolve to a point where a five-year old can describe something to them in plain English and they will create/program it. That might be the furthest into the future, but programmers will eventually obsolete themselves if they do their jobs right.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoProgrammers will be among the last to reach obsolescence, because once programmers are obsolete the rest will happen very, very quickly.
- no_more_death 14y agoI find that really doubtful. I used to believe it, but it seems like you still need operators to run things. Programming tools may become much more powerful, but when it goes wrong, you will need an incredibly intelligent person to sort out what just happened. A five-year-old won't be of much help then. I doubt that we can make computer which simply never go wrong. For example, if a 5yo requests a PB&J sandwich, a powerful machine might accidentally inject something undesirable. How would he know? Or if a kid requests the computer to invent a new skateboard, what if there's some flaw in the material that he can't see that suddenly pops up when he least expects it? A clever machine is only a tool to help with original design -- it really needs an even more clever human being to operate it.
- jiggy2011 14y agoOnce you have a computer that powerful, you have probably removed the need for all human thought and have computers smart enough to micromanage literally everything.
- no_more_death 14y agoWell, currently birth rates are declining not because people have too little, but because they have too much. We only want as many children as we can have without degrading our quality of living or theirs. E.g., a typical family cannot have more than two children because they cannot afford to have the same quality of housing and give the child the same quality of education. Plus, having children gets in the way of people doing what they want to do. The level of inefficiency and unused territory in the world is mindboggling. I think the national park system ties up one-third of land in the US -- land that's absolutely unused. If worst comes to worst, I'm guessing we will start cutting into that resource little by little. It would take many, many decades or centuries to exhaust all of that.